Overall, the main things that affect the cost of solid hardwood floors are species, grade, width and finish.

How does the species of a hardwood floor affect the price?

Species of hardwood is the largest factor in determining the cost of a hardwood floor.  All things being equal, oak flooring is about the cheapest hardwood you can get.  As you go to less common species such as maple, hickory or cherry, the price will go up.  Moving into exotic flooring like wenge, zebrawood or ipe will drive up the cost of flooring materials even more.

How is does the grade of flooring affect the price?

Wood flooring comes in a variety of grades, which determine the overall character and variation between the planks.  For example, oak hardwood flooring is graded accordingly:

• Clear – wood is free of defects, with a uniform appearance and few character marks
• Select – wood has a relatively uniform appearance, but has more natural character marks like knots and color variation than clear wood
• Common No. 1 – wood has more natural variation including color, mineral streaking and knots
• Common No. 2 – wood has a rustic appearance with larger knots and natural markings, or marks from machining.

In any particular tree, there is less wood that meets the criteria for a grade of “clear” than “common”.  As a result, higher grades of wood within a species are more expensive than lower grades.

How does the width of hardwood flooring affect the price?

The wider the width of hardwood flooring, the more expensive it is going to be. The width may not seem like an obvious cost factor, but it is important.  When you cut trees into wider  boards, you will get less yield from a given tree.  Wider boards are also more likely to have defects that will throw the entire piece out of grade, so a high grade, wide plank floor can be particularly costly.

How does the hardwood floor finish affect price?

When you are choosing the finish for your hardwood floor, your basic options are oil based polyurethane, water based polyurethane, or a more durable commercial grade finish.  Prices vary due to the time involved in applying different types of finish, different drying times and the cost of the finish materials themselves.

In general, oil based finishes are the least expensive, followed by water based.  Two part commercial finishes like Bona Traffic are most expensive because of the cost of the products themselves, and the fact that left over materials harden and cannot be saved and used for later coats or other projects.

We recently replaced our old dance floor.  And I’m wondering how to maintain it on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  Since it is a dance floor there is a certain amount of wear and tear.  I would like to know what you would recommend to use for cleaning and polishing.  I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

-Nikole

Dear Nikole:

It’s great to know that you are looking to maintain your new dance floor.  A hardwood floor, especially a commercial hardwood floor, is a great investment.  Being a commercial dance floor, there are a lot of hazards and abuse that your floor will be subjected to.  There are several ways that you can keep that floor looking and performing great for years to come.

Here are some tips for protecting your commercial dance floor:

1. Clean up liquid spills immediately.  Moisture and can damage a hardwood floors by seeping into cracks and gaps and swell the hardwood floor.
2. Dust, dirt, and debris can grind into the hardwood floor when walked on, thus wearing and dulling the finish, so sweep the floor nightly, using a microfiber dust mop, such as the
   Bona Kemi Commercial Cleaning Pad.
3. Damp mop the floor with a spray on hardwood floor cleaner such as Bona Hardwood Spray Mop and cleaner at least weekly, or when needed.
4. Screen and coat your floor every 6 months with a commercial grade hardwood floor finish, such as Bona Traffic.  This requires a professional hardwood floor refinishing company to come in and lightly buff the floor with a screen, and then apply a maintenance coat.

Because the experiences and preferences of flooring companies vary, it’s important to keep in mind that when you choose a professional to refinish the floors, they may recommend a different brand that is of equal quality that they are more comfortable working with. Be sure to discuss this with your flooring professional so they know what your needs and concerns are.

-Rob

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Bruce produces high quality pre-finished oak flooring, but when it comes to oak hardwood flooring, there are a lot of options out there. We actually have a traditional site finished oak floor on the main level of our home. But, when it came time extend our wood flooring into the rest of our home, a site finished product just wasn’t practical for our lifestyle. With two small kids and a home office, we just couldn’t stay off our floors for long enough to have them sanded and finished in place. With that in mind, we selected Bruce hardwood flooring by Armstrong to complete the floors in our home.  We wet with a Bruce pre-finished solid oak product like the Bruce Bristol Low Gloss Butter Rum White Oak Hardwood Flooring because we were confident that a floor from Bruce would give us the level of quality and finish durability we wanted, while still being beautiful and coordinating nicely with our existing floors

Oak Flooring Facts

• Varieties: Red Oak (Quercus rubra), White Oak (Quercus alba)
• Native Habitat: North America, Central America
• Janka Hardness Rating: Red Oak – 1290, White Oak – 1360
• Grades: No. 1 Common, No. 2 Common, Clear, Select

Finish Quality of Bruce Hardwood Floors

The finish on our Bruce floors has proven to be more durable than the oil based finish on our site-finished floors.  It has a beautiful gloss that has held up very well against our three kids, a dog, and ongoing home improvements.  While any hardwood floor can scratch or dent, we’ve been impressed with how resilient the Bruce finish has been.  After almost three years, we haven’t had any problems with the finish like peeling, flaking or discoloration.  For the most part, it looks just as good as the day we installed it.

Installation of Bruce Pre-Finished Floors

The quality and consistent milling on the individual boards of our Bruce solid oak flooring made installation simple.  Boards fit together quickly and easily, and didn’t need to be forced into place, which can sometimes be a problem with poorly milled products whose tongues and grooves don’t match up well.

Overall Appearance of Bruce Hardwood Floors

Our Bruce pre-finished floors have a warm look that blends nicely with our oak site-finished floors.  While we can definitely tell a difference between the two, most visitors to our home who aren’t in the flooring industry don’t even notice that we have two different types of wood flooring.  While we specifically chose a floor that would look as close as possible to our existing floors, Bruce also carries a variety of different styles, colors and species to accent or coordinate with your current interior design style.  In addition to solid wood products, they also carry engineered flooring like Bruce Balance Red Oak Plank Flooring. Overall, we’ve been extremely pleased with the Bruce floors we installed in our own home, and we also have many satisfied flooring customers that also love their Bruce pre-finished floors. Get free shipping on qualifying Bruce pre-finished flooring purchases.

My wife and I are trying to pick out a stain color for our new hardwood floor, and we just can’t seem to agree. I’d like to pick a color that matches our cabinets, but my wife would like to pick a color that compliments some of our other design choices. What do you think?

-John in Omaha

Dear John:

When considering the use of hardwood flooring, it is important to consider the other finishes in the home that will surround the hardwood. Some of these finishes include: base board, chair rail, crown molding, window coverings, cabinets, furniture and more. Often, people tend to think that all of the other wood finishes in the home need to have exact matching hardwood species and stain finish colors.

Think of when you go into your closet and look at a collection of sweaters or pants that are all the same color, black for example. It is virtually impossible for all blacks to be the exact same shade. This is the same with hardwood. Even if you chose the same species of hardwood for your floors and the exact same species and stain for the molding, cabinets or doors in your home it would be virtually impossible for those woods to match. It is impossible to match because of different elements such as the area that the hardwood is grown, the conditions it is grown in, the species and type of stain as well as other variables.

Again, even if you could get everything to match, from a design standpoint, you don’t want all of the woods in your home to match; you want them to coordinate or blend, but not to match exactly. If you could get everything to match, it would look like you went to the wood store and picked everything in your home off the same shelf. That’s no fun! A home looks more balanced and well planned if each different type of wood blends rather than matches. When everything matches, it takes away from the natural beauty of the product as well as its natural characteristics.

Taking it one step further than floors, molding, cabinets and doors coordinating the same “rules” apply to furniture and accessories. It is perfectly acceptable to have a stained cherry piece of furniture in the same room with stained oak floors and doors. It is also perfectly acceptable to have more than one stained species or color of furniture in the same room as a different stained floor or molding.

This advice does not mean that you should mix oak trim with cherry doors with maple cabinets just so that everything does not match – it means that it is ok and expected for all wood finishes in a home not to match exactly.

Be creative, but most importantly, have your expectations set to where you understand that even the same species of hardwood stained the same color will not match exactly.

-Rob

I am refinishing the hardwood floors in an older home. I’m looking for a natural/eco friendly stain and gloss that is non-toxic. Do you have any suggestions?

-Bridgette

Dear Bridgette:

It’s great to know that you are looking to use an eco-friendly and non-toxic floor finish. Choosing a finish is important, because the right finish will protect your floor for years to come.  When considering environmentally friendly finish choices, you want to choose a water based or water borne finish. These finishes have a low VOC (Volatile Organic Components or Compounds) because they use water instead of solvents to carry the urethane molecules.

Off the bat, my first recommendation would be to go with a water based finish made by BonaKemi.  Their floor finishing systems are GREENGUARD-certified for indoor air quality.  They offer a variety of finish choices, ranging from the very low VOC Eon 70 to the more durable Bona Traffic.   BonaKemi finishes are high quality, and I have had excellent results with their products.

Other environmentally friendly finishes and stains include products produced by Bioshield, Safecoat and Ecoprocote.  I don’t have any personal experience working with these products, so I can’t vouch for the results or durability you’ll get with them.

Because the experiences and preferences of flooring companies vary, it’s important to keep in mind that when you choose a professional to refinish the floors, they may recommend a different brand that is of equal quality that they are more comfortable working with. Be sure to discuss this with your flooring professional so they know what your needs and concerns are.

-Rob

I touched up a scratch on my red oak hardwood floor using the same finish that the floor contractor used and it looks duller then the rest…… it was a oil based finish called Fabulon.

-Kim From Alabama

Dear Kim:

I am sorry to hear about your scratched hardwood floor problem. Dull finish or mismatched finish is very common when blending scratch repairs on hardwood floors, and there could be several reasons for this:

1. You may not have stirred the polyurethane well enough before applying it.  If you only dipped your brush into the top of the finish, without stirring well, that may have led to your finish not being shiny.
2. You may have used the right material, but the wrong sheen.  If you didn’t use a can of polyurethane that was left over from your project, call whoever applied the finish to double check what sheen they used.
3. If you sanded the area around the scratch, you may not have applied enough polyurethane in the sanded area, resulting in a dull area because the finish is thinner in that area.

It’s tough to know for sure which of these possibilities applies to your situation, but hopefully they will get you started with solving your problem.

I recommend that you carefully outline with tape the adjacent boards along their edges and then gently scrape the area that you originally touched up with a hand held floor scraper that you can get from any big box home retailer.  That will take the finish back down to nearly bare wood, but do not go all they way down.

I would properly stir, not shake, the polyurethane.  Then carefully apply a thin coat of finish.  Let that coat dry and repeat. If all went well, your floor should be as good as new.

-Rob

I recently had my floors refinished and the poly came out very uneven. Some places it’s really shiny and others, its very dull. Any ideas on a quick fix to even it out? I have to move furniture into these rooms this weekend.

-Lacey G. from Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Dear Lacey:

I assume that you have a polyurethane floor, so I will base my answer on that. The dull and shiny spots in your hardwood floor indicate that your installers did not apply the finish correctly.

Dull spots in polyurethane floors usually indicate that the finish was not applied carefully, the applicator had a dry spot on it, or the finish was thinned out with a solvent such as mineral spirits. The latter is a big mistake, but a common shortcut in the industry among people trying to save money on materials.

Shiny spots in polyurethane floors can be caused by the finish not flowing out properly and pooling in areas, or inconsistent screening between coats of finish.

There is no quick fix for this, what I recommend is that you have the refinishers come back and screen and coat the floor. A screen and coat is a procedure where the floor is lightly sanded (or screened) with a floor maintainer or buffer, instead of a floor sander. This light sanding evens out the finished, cleans away debris, and roughens the surface, so another coat of finish will be able to properly adhere to the existing finish.

There is no other way to even out the finish.

-Rob

-Jared H. from Orem, Utah

Dear Jared: Your installer is not really pulling your leg and is actually trying to make you happy with your floor and his workmanship.

In my own flooring business, Natural Wood Floors, I have been asked to stain many maple and hickory floors when refinishing, but I usually tell my customers no. That usually makes them unhappy, but the reason is that the grains in both maple and hickory flooring can be very hard in spots and very soft in others. When trying to stain these woods, the hard spots will not absorb the stain easily, and when that happens, you will have a light patch that looks blotchy.

When maple or hickory kitchen cabinets are stained, it is done in a factory controlled environment, and they use different types of fast dry, spray-on coatings. They are then dried with UV lights so that the color is consistent. These conditions are impossible to reproduce in your home because the coatings we use on site are gravity permeable and are slower drying.

This is what the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association says about the subject:

“Due to the extremely tight cellular structure and variable grain patterns inherent in northern hard maple, the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association (MFMA) does not recommend staining or bleaching maple strip flooring under any circumstances.

While small areas of individual flooring strips may accept stain without difficulty, it has been our experience that much of the maple surface will appear uneven and “blotchy” following the application of most stains or bleaching agents.

MFMA strongly suggests contacting your floor finish manufacturer directly for specific tinting product recommendations and application instructions.”

I think the risks are too high to move forward with staining maple and hickory, but if you are really dead set on the stain, there is a trick that some very skilled refinishers have used to successfully stain a hickory or maple floor that is called water-popping. When water-popping, the floor is actually dampened with a sponge so the grains can be opened. The wood is more likely to absorb stain. This is a very risky thing to do, and many younger installers have not been taught how to properly do this, so I still do not recommend it.

-Rob